Howie Chang

At 21, Howie Chang joined Creative Technology as a UI designer. Sim Wong Hoo, its founder, told him: “If you want to master a subject, teach it.” Twenty years later, Chang built a coding college in Penang. When Sim died in January 2023, Chang credited him with inspiring the decision to start a company.

We want to play to win, not playing not to lose. When you have that mindset, it changes everything.

The Career That Built the Thesis #

Howie Chang’s career tells a coherent story in retrospect — and almost none in the moment it was unfolding. A decade of design work led to a decade of product management. Product management led to teaching. Teaching led to institution-building. Each move looked oblique from the outside; each made sense from the inside.

The thesis he brought to Forward College was not academic. Chang had sat across the table from graduates who couldn’t write production-ready code. He had built products at companies that Rakuten and Alibaba thought worth acquiring. He had watched Singapore’s tech sector absorb talent that Malaysia had paid to educate and then failed to employ. When he returned to Penang around 2015 or 2016, it was not to run another startup. It was to close a gap he had spent a career identifying: the distance between what coding education claimed to teach and what the industry actually needed.

The Long Arc Home #

Chang grew up in Penang before it was a semiconductor hub. He left for Singapore to study multimedia technology at the Singapore Institute of Management, graduating around 2006 into a job at Creative Technology — the soundcard company that had made Singapore a consumer electronics power in the 1990s. Sim Wong Hoo’s advice came early and stuck: master a subject by teaching it.

Viki was the next move. The video streaming platform — which served Korean and Chinese content with fan-translated subtitles to a global audience — was acquired by Rakuten for approximately US$200 million while Chang served as Head of UX. Then came RedMart, Singapore’s grocery delivery startup, where he served as Director of Product Management. A contemporary description of the Viki-to-RedMart transition called it “uncomfortable personal growth” — Chang moving from a comfortable role into an industry he wasn’t familiar with. When Lazada, backed by Alibaba, acquired RedMart in 2016, Chang had spent roughly a decade at the intersection of product design and technology companies just large enough to be acquired.

The pattern would repeat — but in a different direction.

Coming Home #

Chang left Singapore around 2015 or 2016. His public statement is unambiguous on one point: “After a rather fruitful career working in Viki and RedMart in Singapore, I made my way back for my family and to contribute to Penang with my experience and knowledge.” Family precedes contribution in that sentence. It preceded it in the decision.

He didn’t walk from RedMart’s acquisition into a classroom. Instead, Chang spent roughly two years embedded in Penang’s startup ecosystem: serving as programme director at @CAT Penang, the state government’s co-working hub; founding Ayuh Bina, an innovation consultancy; and launching Gut Studio, a digital product practice. He and Chan Kee Siak co-directed the Penang chapter of Founder Institute. In 2016, he attended the NFX Founder’s Guild in Silicon Valley — exposure to education-to-employment models that had sharpened the skills-gap thesis.

The bridge period lasted until 2018. By then, Chang had crystallized the problem: Malaysia’s private colleges were producing graduates employers had to retrain. Bootcamps were producing certificates without accountability. Neither model answered the question that mattered: did the graduate get a job?

His answer was structural. Not a bootcamp — too short, no depth. Not a university — too slow, too credential-oriented, no employment guarantee. A two-year vocational programme, accredited through JPK’s skills framework, financed through an income share that made the school’s incentives identical to the student’s. He incorporated Forwardemy Sdn Bhd on June 5, 2018.

Conviction Under Pressure #

Pre-seed funding of US$500,000 arrived on February 10, 2020, from five angel investors. Five weeks later, Malaysia locked down. Chang’s response — “We want to play to win, not playing not to lose” — was not bravado. With 17 students enrolled by November 2020 and no follow-on equity available, Forward College’s survival required precisely the offense he described: launching cohorts despite MCO restrictions, building online delivery, pursuing vocational accreditation rather than waiting out the lockdown.

It was about conviction. The ISA model, Malaysia’s first, was discontinued by 2024 — the structural financing experiment proved harder to sustain at small scale than the educational outcomes it was designed to guarantee. Corporate sponsorship and foundation subsidies replaced it. The outcomes didn’t change. When Forward College’s first two NitroDegree cohorts graduated in November 2022, every student had a job.

The Recognition Arrives #

The Penang Chief Minister presented Chang with the Outstanding Education Icon Leadership Excellence Award at the 2025 Empowering Education Summit. His Pingat Jasa Kebaktian state medal — awarded by the Governor of Penang — recognizes the ecosystem contribution that preceded the school. In 2024, he spoke at Bett Asia and helped inaugurate the AI Education Consortium at Tech Dome Penang alongside 12 other institutions.

Sim Wong Hoo’s advice — delivered in a job Chang held for a few years in his early twenties — took two decades to fully execute. The thesis that practitioners who have shipped real products design better education than academics who study it from the outside is not academic. It is the operating principle of a school that opened into a pandemic, placed every student it trained, and earned a state award for doing so.

Last updated: March 15, 2026